2.11.2010

La casa del olvido / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The House of Oblivion

A mirror displays the darkness of the room, where the ancient furniture increases the majesty of the shadow. The yellow of the marks, garnish and engravings vacillates and perishes in a black border. The room occupies an inner edge of the deserted mansion, safe from noise and alarms; it is agreeable for engrossed meditation and for infinite distress; it recalls illusions of years past, a parade of laments. The dream of a livid semblance and funeral wings visits the impregnable retreat, finally posing on the rug-covered floor; he is the only interruption for the vertiginous soliloquy. A high window uncovers the sublime sky, where the cloud floats with a naiad’s swim and runs with Atalanta’s scattered escape. A flexible vegetable follows the window jamb, doubles an arc and turns out to be a single flower; a flower that seems like an artifice: chaste, untouched by time, of an alabaster color and odorless; and that beatific flower of liturgical paleness strikes up blessed relations with a star, glimpsed from the window in a single spot of sky. But the flower suffers another secret and more vehement love: it solicits the neighboring pond, a lair of nude sleeping water, and wants to escape the shadow, to die submissive beneath the sun’s dart, equaling the sacrifice of a certain captive, the lover of the victor in a barbarous epic. The moon places a silver nimbus over the lean flower, a nun refusing sleep and subtracted from the world, a night livened by an immense remote light, a prelude and message from the sky; and that night of contemplation, in its flat pond, the virginal water murmurs in its dreams. The enormous mansion multiplies the ghosts of the shadow and receives the sun’s inundation with the calm of a desert. It disposes the mind to a scrupulous meditation on death and its sealed enclosure enunciates auguries of eternity. In the center of the funeral dwelling, built with severe regularity, the empty ancient well, turned into ditch, can sustain the life of a still cypress. The elusive tree endlessly watches over the unnoticed ditch, and its cusp, finally elevated over the walls of the rigorous mansion, demands the distant horizon and the lenitive of dawn.